Will DOS Always Be With Us?

Will DOS Always Be With Us? 

Kind of like the COBOL programming language, DOS is in a state of perpetually being declared dead, while still seeing moderate, if unenthusiastic, usage. There are very good reasons for this, but they lie in the murky depths of computing history.

To deal with COBOL first, the COmmon Business-Oriented Language came along at the right place and time in history: right when industry world-wide was adopting the mainframe computer. As a result, businesses today are still content to keep running these mainframe systems, and are obliged to keep hiring from an increasingly smaller pool of COBOL programmers to maintain them. The logic here is that there's no reason to buy a newer car if your old one just keeps taking you to the store and back!

With DOS, it, too, came along at the right place and time, but for different reasons. DOS, or Disk Operating System, happened along at the exact time of the desktop computer revolution, when almost overnight, every home seemingly had to have a computer. The Internet itself soon became the must-have reason to own a computer. So during this time, the computer market exploded, and with it, the software market.

Exhibit A is Microsoft. The first version of Windows to see widespread sales was 3.1, and it ran as a shell on top of DOS. Subsequent versions of Windows ran on DOS as well, but slowly phased out the need to have a command line shell supporting them. In fact, Microsoft's latest Windows version do still use a command shell, but only as a side offering. they keep the command-line interface mostly hidden from the end user.

Anyway, DOS was the dominant system for home computing, and so all of the software written at this time ran on DOS. The tech industry just kept growing... To this day, more software exists for the DOS platform than any other!

This leads to a kind of snap-back effect. Unlike COBOL, DOS systems quickly became outdated and home consumers have apparently decided that they need a new computer every three to five years. But one thing they hate to do is switch software! So now we have this legacy of old software that still needs DOS to run. You can see where this is going.

Today, the most prominent substitutes for DOS are the Free and Open Source product DOSBox, or the commercially-produced FreeDOS. Both of them run on modern systems, and run as an embedded program to emulate a DOS environment for legacy DOS-based programs.

DOS is also an extremely light system. The only comparable system to it is the oldest versions of the Linux operating system. You have to go to Linux 2.0 kernel to get as much "bang for buck" in the same space. More recent versions of Linux have become more featured while bloating up in space, and DOS... well, it stopped right there! It is very feature-bare, but it runs! So now DOS has also become a common system on very small digital devices.

These two effects have served to create a continuing life for DOS when, by all logic, it should have died off long ago. Linux, the free interpretation of Unix, has been pressing hard to replace it, since Linux can be customized for any task and the bloat can be stripped out to fit it into small spaces. But for now, DOS still has a twilight existence.

Filed Under: Product Reviews • The Retro Stylez, Toyz